“Coyote, with Mange”


We must avert our eyes; this image is too sickening.  It takes a strong poetic voice to humanize it and a magician to make it loveable.  Mark Wunderlich has written a magnificent poem about a coyote like this one.


“Coyote, with Mange”
Oh, Unreadable One, why
have you done this to your dumb creature?
Why have you chosen to punish the coyote
rummaging for chicken bones in the dung heap,
shucked the fur from his tail
and fashioned it into a scabby cane?
Why have you denuded his face,
tufted it, so that when he turns he looks
like a slow child unhinging his face in a smile?
and without fur, his now visible pizzle
is a sad red protuberance,
his hind legs the backward image
of a bandy-legged grandfather, stripped.
Why have you unhoused this wretch
from his one aesthetic virtue,
taken from him that which kept him
from burning in the sun like a man?
Why have you pushed him from his world into mine,
stopped him there and turned his ear
toward my warning shout?
Source: Poetry (March 2009)
The poem is a series of five piercing questions addressed to the “Unreadable one” who may be our vision of a God, of the crass apathy of Nature, or the untaggable sense that somehow manages things.  The poem has a Thomas Hardyesque unblenching acceptance that disaster and cruelty can strike anywhere.
Mark Wunderlich takes unflinching and realistic snapshots of animals in many of his poems and then he moves on to make the ugly endearing without sentimentalizing or moralizing or trying to serve us a platitudinous finale as a kind of dessert for entertaining the image of the coyote with mange.   Wunderlich makes me feel a deep well of compassion where I might have turned away in disgust.  He shows us the coyote as a “slow child,” a ” a “bandy-legged grandfather,” and a member of our world.  True, he only has one aesthetic virtue:  his fut that has been denuded by the mange.   The fur that protects him from the rays of the sun and keeps his “pizzle” dignified is his house.
Wunderlich has three published books all worthy of purchase.  His topics are numerous and his poems about animals
This is what poetry is for, for me:  to make me look at something in a new and significant way.  Now I see the coyote as a kinsman needing, like me, some sort of house.  I can see making a minute observation of the coyote and seeing the ways in which some outside force has failed him:  not simply the scourge of mange but the indifference of the “Unreadable one.”